Mark Drakeford: Wales facing ‘very difficult days’ if UK Gov breaks Brexit promise
Wales is heading for ‘very difficult days’ unless the UK Government delivers on a Brexit promise to match EU funding, the Welsh First Minister has warned.
Mark Drakeford says that people in Wales voted on Brexit after promises that the nation would ‘not be a penny worse off’ if the UK left the European Union.
In an interview with CNBC International, he said that Wales currently stands to lose out on ‘many, many millions of pounds’, hampering the ability to build a successful economy.
He said: “In 2016, people were promised in Wales, people were persuading them to vote to leave the European Union, but that Wales would not be a penny worse off as a result of Brexit.
“Sadly that is turning out to be absolutely not the case. Wales will be many, many millions of pounds worse off next year as a result of Brexit because the UK Government simply isn’t delivering on that promise.”
Funds
The EU structural funds ended in December 2020 with Wales no longer receiving £375 million a year in economic aid.
The UK Government has pledged to replace the amount lost but by creating a Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF) but has yet to provide clear details of how this will work.
In the meantime, £220m funds are being provided by a Community Renewal Fund but this covers all of the UK nations with Wales expecting to receive around £10m.
Mark Drakeford added that if the UK Government intends to, ”turn the taps off on what I regard as necessary public investment’ then it will lead to “very difficult days here in Wales”.
He said that if the UK Government honoured its promises to replace European funding in full, it will offer, “a path out of coronavirus that is an investment path – not an austerity path.”
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Difficult days ahead then.
Don’t worry too much, there will be more thgan adequate supplies of Union Flags to help keep our spirits up.
Perhaps we can burn them to keep us warm.
Anyone who believed the Westminster government promise to replace EU money after Brexit was a fool. That was a Tory speaking and Tory speech is lies. Especially when promising. Especially when it;s a money promise. They knew full well that by the time it came time to pay up it would be years later and there would be nothing to force them to do it. Hard luck Brexit fools. Except you’ve dropped us all in it.
They should make the Bishop of St David’s the new archbishop then, as she tweeted ‘never trust a Tory’.
Someone should report Fat Shanks to the devolved nation support agency…
Interesting that Mr Drakeford is interviewed by a large American cable TV business news service. Is he touting for investment? What’s the agenda here?
The British media probably won’t interview him because it’ll show this Government up for what it is…..a shower of liers.
Funny that the American media have more respect for our government than the ‘British’ (i.e. English) media.
If we are ‘touting for investment should we not try to ‘open the country up to investing businesses instead of adopting continuing policies that effectively mean that Wales is in the ‘to difficult to invest in pile’, at the present? Eg 5 day test and release scheme available in England but not Wales? We need to stay inside the science but we continually chose to be different to other countries that seem only to happy to stay inside the science and try to facilitate a level of ‘attractiveness’. We still have the ‘shut for now signs’ up!
There is only one way out, as we will never get the full amount we received from the EU, and that is independence. There is no choice, the UK Gov could honour the amount, it’s prepared to spend billions on HS2 so the money is there, but it will not. We will be neglected again and fall further into poverty. Enough is enough I’m now looking forward to a free Wales where we can make our own prosperity.
Yes. We should be taxed in Wales at point of residence, and have our own budget.
Time for Mr Drakeford to finally bite the bullet!
We can’t even agree on how to run a committee !
Good luck with that; you’ll need to prioritize grubbing about for money to survive; Wales was deeply stupidly ungrateful to the EU and now its gone, so suck it up.
“Wales was deeply ungrateful to the EU”. To be generous, many people didn’t seem to understand where the infrastructure money was coming from (I think they call it levelling up nowadays) and “people” like Plaid weren’t around loud enough to explain to them before they cast their vote.
This thread has been running all day, all saying what has been said for months, years, decades. We know how it works. What do you intend to do about it?
You i.e. all the n.c commentators, not Mr Cook
Thank you. It’s always nice to have our nation’s challenge Englishsplained to us.
Even if the Welsh voters had voted remain it would have made no difference to the UK result. Enough retired and older English people moved to Wales to skew the Welsh vote. 650k ‘Welsh’ voters were born in England and about 150k of them were over 65. Wales voted for Brexit by 82k votes. So do the maths.
Or are you suggesting we should ban English pensioners from retiring to Wales?
It could have been better explained to them which side their bread was buttered…Plaid’s job and they fell down on it…for years!
Why not? They are a drain on our health and social care system and skew our demographics to make the population of Wales appear to older and more reactionary than it actually is.
Not born in Wales no vote on brexit or independence, that’s what needs to happen Welsh identity for Welsh born only.
Useful breakdown of the three referendum “constituencies” in Wales, Welsh, English and British, here
Wyn Jones, Richard and Larner, Jac. 2021. ‘What about Wales? Brexit and the future of the UK’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (2) https://doi.org/10.51428/dsoc.2021.02.0004
Some of the people coming from England, have family originating from Wales & Scotland. Most have come to Wales to get a better life, being fed up with England and its political extremes and polarisation. Wales is more European than England, it is a fact that the EU would be a better fit for the economy and expectations of Wales. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 was a UK referendum and Wales never had a direct seat in the EU council of ministers we could not play a full part in the EU – It was always about the UK’s… Read more »
Same old crap whenever any of ‘your’ colonies wants independence. ‘Oh you’ll never cope on your own, not without the benevolent English master race to guide you and support you.’ The English have been proved wrong each and every time starting with the Irish Free State (as it then was) in 1922.
Every former colony is now better off with independence and none of them want to go back.
Just ask yourself one simple question: why is it that the English don’t have an Empire anymore? Or to put it another way: why did all ‘your’ colonies want independence?
Agreed. Wales generates 14% of all UK electricity from just 4% of the population while England imports it from everywhere. We should cut off the excess, shut down the gas pipelines and turn off the water until the English come begging to pay us several billion a day.
That is what you meant, innit?
gas? methane? watch Mr Monbiot’s video on the chicken sheds of Powys on YouTube
Wales puts excess electricity into a European wide network – as certain times.
The companies that do it are multinational so you couldn’t just “switch it off.”
Wales imports all its gas as it has none to speak of.
The relatively small amount of water you are talking about is paid for and administered by infrastructure paid for by someone else
How does this add up to billions
All is taxable.
Gas? I thought we were trying to get away from carbon based fuels. Already objections to an Italian company looking for oil and gas off Aberystwyth. We want more hydroelectric projects. People across the border can still have the water after it has passed through a few turbines. The contentious dams were built and bought after, effectively, compulsory purchase orders by the UK government. The projects would never have been allowed these days. I think the companies have already had more than their money’s worth by now so time for control to come home and allow market forces to prevail.… Read more »
Just like the vibrant capitalist economy of England, that cant feed hungry children, and need a football player to show them up, but who can find money to build a boat and name it Prince Phillip. I hope not.
They only ever kept one promise to Wales….. they promised to steal our resources and culture….. and they did.
“IF”
I’ll go along with that, M.R-R. Confidence is key.
Not exactly. People in Wales, not The People of Wales.
Like People who voted for Brexit should not be confused with actual Brexiteers.
Bonking Bozo ALWAYS breaks promises. He’s also a serial liar, a cheat, a coward, an adulterer and an ignorant, arrogant Tory pig.
ANGRY MARK! Where have you been man? We’ve missed your daily emotional meltdowns.
Well if Wales miss out, no doubt that the right wing media will try to blame it on devolution, and some people will swallow it.
The people of Wales voted to leave the EU. They insisted they knew what they were voting for. They wanted it, they got it. If it’s not to their taste then I suggest that in reality they couldn’t be bothered to undertake some simple internet research about the advantages of EU membership before they voted. Otherwise they would have easily seen through the lies of the Leave campaign, as I did. It’s going to be a very painful lesson and, as someone who knows what he’s talking about, it has only just started.
I agree with you, having also put some effort into discovering for myself in 2016 how much we stood to lose. I still contend that the entire UK suffered more from the combination of emotive campaigning and outright lies than from lies alone. It was difficult not to be swayed when the opposite – remain – camp used reason as the basis of their campaign and put so little effort into it because “who’d be so foolish as to vote leave?” We all know (Yes… I know. Just a bit of rhetoric) how untrustworthy any information is when obtained from… Read more »
I believe we are entitled to a first and second choice these days Defaid. As long as we remained in the EU their rules were the checks and balances that kept both Fat Shanks and co in their box and our freedoms assured and the levelling up money coming in, not to mention all our services and wagons rolling. Now the long road to freedom, and it will be a hard slog, is the only option left to us. Starmer’s labour will be in the wilderness beyond what few years I have left unless by a secular miracle they form… Read more »
What you have to remember is that for many people internet ‘research’ means believing the sh1te they read on Facebook. Most people don’t have the ability to carry out basic research even if they somehow manage to pry themselves away from Facebook or Youtube. This is why so many anti-vaxxers justify their beliefs because they have supposedly ‘researched’ vaccines and Covid on Facebook and Youtube. The fact that they aren’t in any way qualified to conduct research into viruses, pandemics or vaccines and wouldn’t understand a genuine scientific paper on any of these subjects is something they are completely oblivious… Read more »
It is still a long road from a faulty Brexit campaign to exclusion from the promised Prosperity Fund, over-riding of devolved powers and the threatened imposition of freeports. That is “government” of a whole different order.